[albertzeyer]

I don't really remember the exact numbers anymore, but covering only the top 5 languages will cover maybe 40% of the world population, while covering the top 200 languages (many of them low resource) will cover maybe 90% of the world population.

Some numbers (but you can not exactly infer from them such accumulated numbers): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num...

Some more numbers from here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016763931...

"96% of the world’s languages are spoken by only 4% of its people."

Although this statement is more about the tail from the approx 7000 languages.

[jefftk]

It doesn't sound like you're considering that people are very often fluent in a major language in addition to their regional one?

[albertzeyer]

I am. That's why I mentioned that you can not infer my statements directly from the numbers you find on Wikipedia etc. You can not simply add up those numbers.